Useful Phrases for Immigrants

by May-lee Chai

  The Carvel is a fancy place here, belying its strip mall associations. There are freezers of frozen cakes, a bright counter, tables to sit at. There are some smart-looking young intellectuals with fancy eyeglasses and cool t-shirts, two young women with expensive purses. Six years after Tiananmen, I have to admit the city has certainly embraced the concept of moving on.

  “So what would you like?” Luce asks brightly. She is being an exceptionally good sport.

  I’m doing something cliché and touristy, and I know that Luce avoids these things in general. She wants to be the cool American in China, the almost-a-local-if-only-she-weren’t-so-Caucasian-looking, not the tourist who goes to every Western franchise in Beijing, but she’s doing it for me. The last time we’d been together had not ended well. She cheated on me with a student, and I on her with a man, but she’s the one who feels guilty, and I’m the one who still feels aggrieved, and that’s why she’s willing to accompany me to this obscenely tacky place and politely ask me what I want to order.

  The young woman behind the counter smiles prettily. Luce speaks to her in Mandarin, and the girl giggles and tells Luce how wonderful her Chinese is. For all Luce’s efforts to become a local, she can’t undo the privilege that comes from every imported American movie and TV show and their white stars. She’s treated like a celebrity, like an exotic high-end consumer good here. This, too, used to be a sore point between us. I was jealous of the attention she received, and Luce resented my ability to pass as a local.

  “I would like a slice of ice cream cake,” I say deliberately in English.

  “Very good,” the girl says. “What flavor?”

  And I know immediately, chocolate with mint chip. Jeremy’s favorite.

  I take the plate to the counter by the window, choose the corner seat. I don’t want any distractions. It’s been so long, and this is the last place I expected to find a remnant from the ashes of my childhood. I cut a corner with the edge of my fork.

  The salty and the sweet.

  Thick, heavy chocolate layer of crunch. Smooth layer of ice cream. Half-inch slab of icing over the whole thing.

  I’M TEN-AND-A-HALF again, it’s summer, and I’m plotting secrets with my mother. We always got a Carvel cake for my brother’s birthday, personalized. The last one had a blue whale on top and “Happy Birthday, Jeremy!” in a bubble emerging from the whale’s blowhole.

  It was diabetes on a plate, but Jeremy had to have a Carvel cake or it wasn’t special. It wasn’t like a real birthday, he said.

  We got him one every year, but we always pretended it was a surprise. Mom wouldn’t mention it so Jeremy would think she forgot.

  This time Mom took me along while Jeremy was playing at his best friend Seymour’s house. “It’s our secret,” Mom said, and she winked at me.

  I nodded, seriously.

  Mom told Mrs. Beck we were going grocery shopping, or normally I would’ve stayed to play, too. The better for kickball teams. Seymour and Jeremy and one of the twins and me and the other twin. The little boys couldn’t play so well yet, they would mostly run around and scream, and the teams were three against two, but it all evened out because I was an excellent kicker while Seymour had a lame leg. But today Mom said I couldn’t stay. “Errands,” she said, to throw off my brother.

  So we were heading down the turnpike and I was talking about the exact cake we should get. Mint chocolate chip on top, chocolate on bottom, and the blue whale on top, because Jeremy was going through a phase and loved whales. Killers and beluga and baleen and even the underappreciated Norwegian sei whale. I knew exactly what the whale should look like, with one round eye and a slight smile on its blue face, like the one in the Richard Scarry book that first set Jeremy on the whale path.

  Mom says, “Mmm-hmm, mm-hmm,” like she wasn’t really listening, and when I stopped talking, she didn’t notice but continued squinting out the windshield, her lips pursed, like she was scanning the horizon for faraway things, not only trucks and cars. I was just happy to be included. Dad didn’t plan secrets like this. He was busy with work, he was always busy. It was fun to go with Mom.

  I DIDN’T plan on being the kind of person who likes secrets. What’s charming in a child becomes something else in an adult. If I could find the words to explain this to Luce, I would apologize.

  What I do instead, the moment we are back in the Jeep, is kiss her.

  She’s surprised, but she kisses me back. “I didn’t expect this,” she says.

  I wish she would stop trying to talk. I hold onto her face with both hands and place my tongue in her mouth, and I can still taste the Carvel icing, FD&C Blue No. 1.

  WHEN WE pulled up to the Carvel’s that time with Mom, there was a man pacing in front. He was Caucasian and wearing a suit jacket but no tie. Standing on the sidewalk, looking at his watch, looking the wrong way, waiting.

  Mom saw him and popped off her seat belt. “Wait here,” she said in her serious voice, and slammed the door behind her. I was trapped because our Buick was still running, the keys in the ignition, and I couldn’t just leave the car like that. Anything could happen.

  I thought she was going to rush in to get Jeremy’s cake and rush out again to me because of the man waiting there like that. I thought he was kind of creepy, and I thought she wanted me to wait in the car to protect me.

  That’s how I used to think in those days.

  Mom went straight up to the man on the sidewalk and started talking to him, and he turned and smiled. Mom touched his arm and fiddled with her purse strap over her shoulder. The man touched her elbow, and she did not flinch. He kept his hand there, and then Mom nodded at the car with her chin, and the man looked at the car and saw me watching him through the windshield.

  He smiled at me but stopped touching Mom’s elbow.

  I scowled at him.

  He turned back to Mom, and they continued talking, I couldn’t hear the words, just the texture. Mom’s voice tumbling out, word after word, and then the man, a lower rumble, and suddenly a peal of Mom’s laughter, the high notes puncturing the air.

  I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach then, hard, like something was in there that wouldn’t go down, and I could taste salt on the back of my tongue and something sweet, like I’d just eaten thick gooey icing, although I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and that was a baloney sandwich with iceberg lettuce and yellow mustard on white bread, like normal, and then an apple and a chocolate chip cookie. And suddenly I thought, It’s the cookie.

  Flour and sugar and something oily were coating the top of my throat, the tops of my teeth. I tried to breathe through my mouth, but that only made it worse.

  There were no bags in the car except my book bag, and I couldn’t be sick in that.

  I opened my door and flung myself toward the curb and threw up right there on the asphalt.

  Both Mom and that man turned and saw me vomiting. Mom pursed her lips together sour plum style and hissed, “Jun-li, how could you?”

  Back at home, Mom didn’t speak to me again, she just put Jeremy’s cake in the back of the freezer behind the Eggo waffles and the old half-gallon container of Neapolitan ice cream from the A&P and the boxes of Green Giant frozen vegetables. My brother wouldn’t think to hunt around in the freezer. He wasn’t like me. The month before Christmas I started hunting through the house to see where my mother might have hidden my presents. I volunteered to fold the laundry and put everything away just so I could check the linen closet, rummage through my father’s sock drawer and my mother’s underwear in her dresser. I checked under the bed and in the closets. But Mom always found a new place, one I hadn’t thought of yet.

  Jeremy, on the other hand, never thought to look for things. He was happy to play with his friends or his toy soldiers, lying on the floor of the family room on his belly, shooting Pew! Pew! Pew!, content to assume our parents would take care of his needs.

  But my suspicious nature had a downside. I knew our parents argued in their bedroom. I was standing outside the
door, quiet, the time Mom threw the clay statue we got on vacation at Wildwood against the wall and Dad smashed the blue bowl that held his cufflinks and tie tacks on the floor. After that, when I put away the laundry, I checked to make sure nothing was missing or broken: the empty Joy perfume bottle on Mom’s dresser, the old cloisonné box from China that Ye-ye and Nai-nai had given them for their wedding, the knickknacks from the Circle Line Cruise we all took around the Statue of Liberty.

  Now I knew about the man, too, but what about him I wasn’t sure how to put into words.

  LUCE AND I don’t go to the hole in the wall place for noodles. We go back to Luce’s apartment. She tells me first that she has a girlfriend, who is visiting her parents this weekend, but it’s an “open relationship.” Luce wants everything to be clear, so there will be no misunderstandings this time. I fight the urge to roll my eyes, but I get the impression that Luce is not calling the shots in this relationship. Maybe the girlfriend hasn’t come out to her parents, I think. Maybe they’re still hoping to set her up with a nice young man; maybe that’s what this visit is all about and why Luce is the one who’s acting vulnerable. She’s blinking a lot, those long lashes fluttering over her troubled green eyes.

  I nod like I’m listening, but what I’m doing is trying to forget. I want Luce to make me feel wanted, I want her body to distract me. I don’t know what Luce wants. Maybe Luce wants to prove that she can still make me cry out, that I didn’t really mean to leave her like that, that I should have forgiven her. I’ve been too distracted by my own wounds to think what kind I’ve left on Luce.

  AFTERWARDS, ALL I can taste is the Carvel icing on the back of my tongue. Maybe it’s the salt from her skin that throws the flavor into such sharp relief. I’d forgotten that the blue icing tastes like Play-Doh. Why had I ever liked it? But then I remember how I used to scrape the icing off. I only liked the chocolate parts. I was fussy like that as a child whereas Jeremy ate everything.

  MOM HATED Carvel cakes.

  The night of Jeremy’s birthday, she refused to eat it. This was our private, just-family celebration before the real party that weekend when kids from school would come.

  But that night Mom wasn’t hungry. She pushed her plate away. “I just don’t know how you can eat this,” she said.

  My father and brother looked up, startled, but she wasn’t talking to them.

  “My daughter, ha,” she said. “My daughter likes this kind of thing.” She picked up her fork between two fingers and let it dangle over the plate before dropping it in disgust. Clank.

  I felt my nose burn. I forced my eyes to stare at the table, at the eight blue candles lying on the paper plate, the icing clinging to the ends, the blackened wicks, staring as though they were the most interesting candles in the world so that I wouldn’t blink and start to cry.

  “I have to go to class.” Mom stood up, her chair scraping against the linoleum, scrape scrape against my ear.

  I should have blurted it out then. I should have said her secret. But I didn’t. Mom knew me too well.

  Staring at the table top, I bit my tongue and felt a knot burning in my stomach, the acid rising. I’d barely make it to the tiny half bath off the kitchen before I threw up again.

  I HAVE to go to the bathroom. Luce waits in bed, and I slip out from under the sheets and grab my clothes while I’m at it. I don’t like walking around half-naked.

  Luce has a Western style toilet, but the room is as small as a broom closet.

  There is a retro-looking thermos for hot water, but it’s empty and I’m not going to risk rinsing my mouth with water from the tap. I grab a tube of toothpaste and rub it across my teeth then spit and spit again, but now my mouth only tastes like Play-Doh and Aqua-fresh. I open the medicine cabinet, hoping to find some semblance of mouthwash, but there are only the usual assortment of prescriptions and ointments. Plus Playtex tampons placed strategically on the top shelf. Luce is very particular about what she puts into her body. Only those weird organic cotton ones that have no plastic applicator will do. I imagine the Playtex belong to the girlfriend, the one Luce thinks she’s in an open relationship with. No matter what Luce may believe, the moment I see the tampons I know the woman is staking a claim.

  The room is so small my knees nearly touch the wall in front of me when I sit on the toilet. I put my forehead in my hands, and all at once I am crying, hot thick tears pouring through my fingers, snot running down my face, a child’s tears. I can’t stop them.

  It’s the Play-Doh taste on my tongue.

  AFTER JEREMY’S birthday that year, Mom announced that she was separating from our father. “I want you to know this situation has nothing to do with the two of you,” she told us as we sat on the couch in the TV room, Jeremy’s eyes wide and scared looking. “Your father and I love you very much,” Mom said.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he managed to blurt out, his eyes filling with liquid.

  “It’s because of Vincent, isn’t it?” I sneered. I knew the man’s name by then. I’d kept my ears open when my parents argued. I’d known to listen.

  “Jun-li, don’t make your brother upset,” Mom said. She sat beside him on the sofa now, put her arms around him, and he hung his head into her lap and howled. She patted his back. “Look what you’ve done.”

  “Hush, hush,” she rocked with Jeremy in her arms, like he was a baby and not an eight-year-old boy in a bowl cut and blue striped t-shirt.

  I was jealous then. Jeremy was always the baby and I had to stand here watching my mother comfort him when I wanted to cry too. What I said was, “I hate you. You can go. You can go forever.”

  Mom looked up over Jeremy’s back, her eyes narrowed at me, annoyed. “Jun-li, I need you to be reasonable. You’re too old to act this way.”

  And I wanted to slap my brother then until his nose bled.

  I stole all Jeremy’s toy soldiers, the green plastic kind that came in a bag of twenty-five, and I threw them in the neighbor’s trash. I grabbed his Fantastic Four comic collection and ripped them into shreds. I put salt in his guppy tank and glue on his Legos, but he didn’t cry anymore, and Mom still left that summer.

  I used to wish Dad had left and Mom had stayed. Even though I argued more with Mom and she was always angry at me. But Dad was always busy with work, he was always distracted, and he didn’t worry about Jeremy the way Mom did, because Jeremy was her favorite.

  At the very end of summer, Jeremy’s best friend Seymour had a birthday party at the lake. He invited too many kids, his whole class, and because it was the last party before school started again, the whole class had shown up. It had been an especially hot and sticky week in late August, and most kids arrived with their little sisters and brothers in tow, parents figuring this was a good place to dump everyone for an afternoon, get them out of the sticky houses, let them blow off steam one last time.

  The lake was artificial, not very large and not very clean. Normally Mom didn’t let us swim there. Jeremy and I had both gotten ear infections the first summer we’d gone there for our swim lessons with the Red Cross when I was in second grade. After putting drops in our ears for a week, Mom was sick of it. She only ever took us to the pool at the Y after that, and then we stayed in the shallow end since we’d never finished the swim lessons.

  Dad didn’t know this, however. Or at least he didn’t think about it. He let Mrs. Beck take us. Mrs. Beck was happy to have me along because she knew I was dependable. I’d heard her say this to Mom once, which meant she could leave the twins with me and go do other things and I’d have to take care of them.

  No one was watching out for Jeremy after he and Seymour had a fight about who was cheating as they sat on the bank with their action figures, the Hulk versus the Thing, and Seymour threw sand into Jeremy’s eyes. I could hear the argument from where I stood. Seymour was used to getting his way on account of his bum leg, Jeremy was kind in that way, but this time Jeremy got up and left.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw his chunky
self run across the sand, but I didn’t follow. I didn’t intervene. I told myself I was too busy looking after the twins, who were tossing a beach ball on the edge of the water. In truth, I was angry at Jeremy for being our mother’s favorite, and I let him go.

  Mr. Tralucci was the one who noticed Jeremy had been gone for a while. He had some kind of father’s sixth sense.

  Then everyone had to get out of the water. Everyone stood in clumps on the artificial beach, on the dirt mixed with the imported sand, shivering, while the adults counted heads, and the lifeguards blew their whistles, and then some of the men shouted, and one of the lifeguards jumped into the water and swam to the wood dock on the other side of the lake, where they used to make us dive off during the Red Cross swim lessons.

  They wouldn’t let us kids see Jeremy’s body.

  A hole opened up in my guts then, and I crouched by the side of the lake, heaving.

  After that, my parents did not get the divorce I’d been bracing for. Whatever differences might have driven them apart, Jeremy’s drowning now brought them back together, locked in a kind of pain that was much, much worse.

  AS A child, I blamed myself. I understood that I was a vengeful kind of person. I had wanted to hurt my mother. I had been angry at my brother. Who was to say I hadn’t subconsciously willed this disaster?

  There’s a proverb in classical Chinese about digging two graves when you prepare to take revenge: for your enemy and yourself. In my case there was only one grave, reserved for the one truly innocent person in my life.

  I MIGHT never have seen Luce again if mutual acquaintances had not put us in touch, letting me know that Luce had moved to Beijing.

  Luce had apologized long ago. She said she was not good with endings. It was her fault, she said, taking up with her student while still sleeping with me. She had not meant to hurt me, she said.

  And I thought I’d gotten over her, the rejection, the feeling that I was not good enough, the need to prove that she should never have let me get away, but no. I was apparently the Freudian cliché, intent upon repeating my history in an attempt at mastery, only to fail and fail again.